I understand the Snapdragon is ARM and not x86, but that’s about all that I understand…
There seems to be quite a bit of hubbub about this. What’s the deal?
Are desktop applications expected to “just work™” via some kind of emulation in Windows?
Will this mean laptops can have “always on” capabilities like phones/tablets?
Is Snapdragon expected to be able to compete with higher-end laptop/mobile workstation CPUs?
A true shot at competing against Apple with an ARM CPU, that’s pretty much it. And this implies:
I don’t think they do. They’re targeting square on the M series chips from Apple because that’s where they can be strong. Apple put an M series chip in their desktop PC and it’s useless. Any serious workstation wipes the floor with it.
Yes, with an emphasis on emulation. Apple does things differently using an interpreter (it’s like DXVK that translates DirectX API calls into Vulkan API calls).
The main appeal of an ARM SoC is much lower power consumption, hence much better battery life than what Intel-based CPUs can deliver today. If that goes along with reasonably good performance, within range of Apple’s M series SoCs, they start to get interesting.
Personally, I’ll wait until Linux support for them is up to scratch because I’m not interested in Windows but that’s just me. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13s is almost there but it’s not cheap.
Not really at the standard TDP of ~22 watts but they have designed the chip to run with a TDP up to 90 watts. So we will see if anyone builds laptops around these higher TDPs and what the real life performance gains are if they do.
Also Qualcomm is open to pairing them with discrete GPUs so this could definitely have the potential to make them a more viable mobile workstation unlike the Apple silicon with only iGPUs.
To me it just seems like a very strong hype bubble that qualcomm is feeding with a massive advertising budget.
We already have x86 processors that best Apple’s M series processors in power efficiency in most benchmarks, namely a subset of the Alder Lake-N series, they just don’t scale to the same high-ish performance of the M series.
There isn’t really any inherent efficiency gains to using ARM, its just that most companies that produce ARM chips design anemic chips that run slow which give them an edge in power efficiency.
I think there is an argument that Apple has produced chips that can use very little power while also scaling up to great performance (with more power usage), the primary reason they can do this is not because they adopted ARM chips but because they can control the entire hardware-software stack now and implement more wholistic power saving features that no other OS/hardware combo can.